Nickel Belt News to fold

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This article was published 19/04/2022 (1296 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Nickel Belt News has become the latest economic victim of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The free weekly publication out of Thompson that was mailed to 21 communities in the region as far north as Churchill will cease publication after this Friday’s edition.

But publisher Lynn Taylor said the paper’s readers are not going to have to go without locally produced news about their communities.

The Nickel Belt News is the longtime sister publication to the Thompson Citizen, both of which are owned by Glacier Media.

Subscribers to the Nickel Belt News (NBN) will start receiving the Thompson Citizen (TC) instead, with the Citizen’s former Wednesday publication switched to Friday.

Taylor said the plan is to publish a second section of the TC that would be mostly community news.

The two weeklies have been keeping northerners informed since the early ’60s when they were competing publications.

In 1967 they were merged under the same ownership with the NBN focusing on regional coverage and distribution throughout the north and the TC focusing on coverage and distribution in the City of Thompson.

Taylor said the pandemic hit the advertising market in the North hard and while that’s starting to improve it’s still far from pre-pandemic levels, so the decision was made to consolidate operations into one title.

“Generally speaking, advertising volumes are down,” she said. “They tanked for a little while (during the pandemic) and although we are seeing a recovery they are certainly not to the same extent we had before.”

W.H. (Duke) DeCoursey founded the Citizen in 1960. The NBN, published by Grant and Joan Wright, followed in 1961. The Wrights bought the Citizen in 1967, maintaining them as separate publications. Glacier Media Inc. out of Vancouver has owned the papers since 2007.

During the pandemic the NBN was down to four to eight pages per week and the TC averaged about 12 pages.

Taylor said the hope is that starting next week the TC will get up to 16 pages per issue.

“We are very optimistic,” Taylor said. “We feel the paper is important not only to the city but to all our neighbours in the outlying communities.”

Distribution numbers have also fallen. During the pandemic the total circulation of the two papers was down to about 5,000, about half of what the total circulation of the two papers was before COVID hit, when about 4,500 copies of the TC was available every Wednesday and 7,000 copies of the NBN on Fridays.

The paper also recently lost three staffers — one each from editorial, production and administration — who have not yet been replaced.

The two papers shared a fairly comprehensive web presence but, perhaps because of less-than-ideal broadband access in the North, the paper version of the paper was always in demand.

“Everybody thinks digital is the way to go but we put out 50 copies of the Citizen every Wednesday morning in a box in front of our office and we always have to replenish it by Friday,” she said.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca